Exploring Embodied Emotional Communication: A Human-oriented Review of Mediated Social Touch

TL;DR

This review comprehensively analyzes mediated social touch (MST), highlighting its potential to convey emotions and foster social connections through tactile interfaces, and proposes a structured design framework for future development.

Contribution

It provides a structured understanding of MST's emotional expression space, mapping strategies, and design considerations, serving as a comprehensive reference for future research and applications.

Findings

MST can effectively express a wide range of emotions through tactile signals.

Design space includes body location, device form, tactile modalities, and parameters.

MST enhances emotional communication, empathy, and social connection in human-human and human-robot interactions.

Abstract

This paper offers a structured understanding of mediated social touch (MST) using a human-oriented approach, through an extensive review of literature spanning tactile interfaces, emotional information, mapping mechanisms, and the dynamics of human-human and human-robot interactions. By investigating the existing and exploratory mapping strategies of the 37 selected MST cases, we established the emotional expression space of MSTs that accommodated a diverse spectrum of emotions by integrating the categorical and Valence-arousal models, showcasing how emotional cues can be translated into tactile signals. Based on the expressive capacity of MSTs, a practical design space was structured encompassing factors such as the body locations, device form, tactile modalities, and parameters. We also proposed various design strategies for MSTs including workflow, evaluation methods, and ethical and cultural considerations, as well as several future research directions. MSTs' potential is reflected not only in conveying emotional information but also in fostering empathy, comfort, and connection in both human-human and human-robot interactions. This paper aims to serve as a comprehensive reference for design researchers and practitioners, which helps expand the scope of emotional communication of MSTs, facilitating the exploration of diverse applications of affective haptics, and enhancing the naturalness and sociability of haptic interaction.